Do you ever come across a word that becomes like a bee in your bonnet? A phrase that becomes an intellectual itch that must be scratched? Why are some ideas so darned intriguing?

Every now and then I’ll stumble across a body of work that alters my perception and understanding of the world. I can look back at some of these and clearly see a before-and-after in my thinking. Sometimes the fulcrum of these mental levers is just a word or two.

‘Enmity’ was the keyword in Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy. Helped me understand the psychology of conflict in my early 20s.

In Sexual Persona, Camille Paglia clued me in to word ‘chthonian’, along with a unique mythological lens through which to view society.

Tom Wolfe cracked the code of modern art for me in The Painted Word. He remodeled my understanding of architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House. Both required more than a few words, but far less pages than one might expect.

When I asked Terence McKenna what we were to do with our insights and ideas, he boiled his message down to “create meaning”

Lately the word is ‘liminal’. It’s central to the idea that our species is evolving away from our more liminal roots and towards a world where a less-liminal existence will be the norm.

You could think of liminality as that magical ’space-between’. It’s that moment of ambiguity where our human awareness encounters the world. Our inner life informs our agency to act. In other worlds, cognition rooted in embodied sensory immediacy.

It’s the difference between reading someone’s micro-expressions in a face-to-face chat or wondering if that text you’re reacting to was supposed to be sarcastic.

This post about ‘the Gen-Z stare‘ is where I stumbled across this somewhat sobering evolutionary hypothesis. ‘Eusociality’ is better left to the bees if you ask me.

Us folks who like to dance and play and make art and music together lead the way in liminal living. We are at the forefront of keeping our liminal legacy alive and well —here, now, and into the future.

Everyone who is practicing and participating in the embodied arts will continue to serve an ever-more-valuable role as we ride the cosmic surfboard of evolution.

If there’s a moral to the story that can be said in two words, it’s probably ‘keep dancing’!

Merci et à bientôt!

M+

ML #638

Mark Metz
Monday Love
Music & Movement Calendar